Chris

Important If True 38: The Terrible Power of Knowledge

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Important If True 38:

Important If True 38


The Terrible Power of Knowledge
Things are starting to come together. Everything is clicking into place. But somehow…it's not adding up. The more you understand, the less sense it all makes. Fortunately, we're here to help, so ask away. For instance: Why is the number 314 omnipresent, and what does it have to do with Stephen Hawking? Can anything stop honey magnate Ray Liotta's dogged pursuit of fast food endorsement deals? And how do you convince the Taco Bell drive-through guy that you're secretly a lascivious weedlord? All this and more. Listen in.

Discussed: bits and squeezes, the number 314, a delicious hoisting, Stephen Hawking, 17-hour ghosts, Benford's law, delusional self-conceptions, The Power of Books, engineering problems for children, knowledge as power, a very bad Steve Jobs joke, some other bullshit about numbers or something probably, Hawaiian shirts, children being cursed by inappropriate gifts, Chip & Dale: Rescue Rangers dressing like Magnum P.I. and Indiana Jones, inadvertently cultivating a visual motif in your home, separating the owl wheat from the owl chaff, the psychic toll of gift-giving, the stupid mall and all the stupid little stores in it, fancy-ass letterpress blank greeting cards from the frou-frou greeting card store, cash, state quarters, $2 bills, Steve Wozniak's perforated $2 bills, inadvertently cultivating a reputation as a late-night Taco Bell lascivious weedlord, cultivating a network of useless contacts, Ray Liotta's food empire, Bee Movie, the apostasy of Colonel Sanders, Foodfight!, Ray Liotta's two olives

Send us your questions at [email protected]. If you enjoyed this and would like to subscribe to an ad-free feed, please consider supporting Idle Thumbs by backing our Patreon.

Jake's Endorsement: Pentametron, iambic pentameter-seeking Twitter bot

Nick's Initial Really Frivolous Endorsement: Using cheap plastic squeeze bottles for your olive oil and other kitchen staples Nick's Endorsement: Deriving holiday gift ideas based on what the recipient might be missing from their past life, such as shipping frozen lake perch to your former Michigander parents

Chris' Endorsement: Taking the time and effort to spatchcock and roast a whole chicken: butterflying the bird, dry brining the chicken a day or two ahead of time, roasting the chicken, using a meat thermometer to avoid overcooking (great but pricey Thermapen, less pricey mid-range option, cheaper alternative), making stock out of the leftover carcass and meat bits

Sponsored by: Warby Parker prescription glasses with free home try-on, Quip electric toothbrushes with $10 off your first brush head refill

 

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I wonder if Justin has ever read the Homestuck...

 

Spoiler

The number 314 figures heavily throughout the series, and a lot of key updates happened on 3/14 several years running.

 

EDIT: I just realised that before I posted this I had 420 posts, and now I've ruined that.

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Really enjoyed the Heffalumps and Woozles joke, but not as much as I enjoyed listening to Jake fall apart during the ad-read.

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Other than confirmation bias, Benford's law i think is a fantastic explanation of why those digits would be so present.  But also more pronounced in systems that are not base 10.  Systems like time put a greater frequency on low numbers since they don't count up to 99:99.  And many systems like receipts and order numbers will truncate to lower numbers and just roll over after a few digits to simplify.

314mug.png

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I'm surprised that no one brought up the idea that immediately jumped to my mind re: Jake's cut & paste greeting card ploy, which is the supreme hoisting scenario where there's an exceptionally hot day which weakens the glue, so when your grandpa opens the card and sees that "you are the best granddad" has been intentionally pasted over with "Happy Birthday," you have set them up for the sickest accidental burn possible.

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I am so onboard with this angst towards the obligatory seasonal gifting ritual. My adult family now asks what to get each other for the day, which then involves coming up with some sort of consumer tchotchkes to give or receive.

 

I value the sentiment, but the burden of random stuff and the guilt of eventually offloading it is tiresome.

 

...But finding a gift some one will really enjoy is thrilling, I admit.

 

Dialectics of gifting

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My future holds alot including you
And online shopping sounds fantastic too

 

I won a chocolate bar in school today
Mistakes were clearly made along the way.

 

My sister thinks miami is a state
im gonna take her on a ice-cream date.. ::)

 

Real music isn't on the radio.
Who doesn't like a ballerina though?

 

I'm cut and weeping like a rubber tree
your twitter drama doesn't interest me

 

My new obsession after ruby red
food, shower, cellphone search, assignment, bed.

 

I'm getting back into the gym today
DELAY DELAY DELAY DELAY DELAY...

 

Our thoughts determine our reality.
The person you were kissing wasn't me.

 

I'm tired of pretending I'm okay
I wanna be a mermaid for a day

 

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On 11/19/2017 at 7:47 AM, aquason said:

 

I thought that was 413?

 

Augh, you're right! Delete my entire existence.

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For me the gift curse used to be my grandparents from my mom's side giving me set of empty recordable VHS tapes every Christmas after I once in the 90's said I record a lot of stuff from tv. Last year I got it was 2007 when my grandfather was still alive.

 

I feel like shit now remembering it because I had stopped the recording VHS stuff around 2002 or so and I was never grateful enough to my grandparents for that. I just had piles of VHS tapes from them at my apartment.

 

Same thing when my mom was sick with leukemia and the last Christmas in 2014 she bought me some stuff for just that Christmas that I had never actually liked, but that year because of the the sickness making her really tired she had thought I had always liked it, I should've told her that I liked it. I kind of just blankly looked at the present and didn't show any proper appreciation. I really feel like shit because of that... I never manage to do the right thing in situations like these because I freeze up.

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